Upcoming Lecture Series Celebrates 100 Years of Einstein
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Einstein's three great scientific papers on relativity, light and matter. In a series of three talks collectively titled "Eye to Eye with Einstein: A 21st-Century Appreciation of His Science," Dr. Henry Greenside (Department of Physics, Duke University) will explain why Einstein's 1905 publications are still vital and important today. Join us in the meeting room on the lower level of the Chapel Hill Public Library for one or all of these fascinating presentations.
Sunday, Oct. 2 (3:00-4:30 pm): Einstein's Relativity Theories and What
is E=mc2 All About?
In this talk Dr. Greenside will describe Einstein's theories of
relativity theories and some of their crazy but established consequences
such as time slowing down and lengths contracting when an object moves
quickly, that time travel into the future is possible (and has been
accomplished), that energy can be converted to matter and vice versa,
and that gravity arises from a warping of space and time by mass.
Sunday, Oct. 9 (3:00-4:30 pm): Einstein and the Photon Concept
What is light? In 1905, Einstein made a radical proposition that light
was not waves moving through some kind of medium like water but
particles called "photons" that had wave-like features. In this talk,
Dr. Greenside will explain how Einstein's suggestion of photons was the
beginning of a scientific revolution called quantum mechanics that has
greatly changed our understanding of what is matter and light and has
become the deepest and most accurate scientific theory the human race
has yet developed.
Sunday, Oct. 23 (3:00-4:30 pm): Einstein and Atoms
What is the world made of? The ancient Greeks thought substances were
made of indivisible atoms but scientists were unable to confirm their
existence until Einstein, in 1905, came up with a brilliant suggestion
about how to prove their existence. Brownian motion has since become a
metaphor for many complex patterns in space and time including financial
time series and the fractal shapes of mountains and clouds. The
existence of atoms has, in turn, provided the foundation for much of
modern science, especially biology.
Henry Greenside is Professor of Physics at Duke University. He was an undergraduate at Harvard and got his PhD at Princeton, where he often bicycled past Einstein's house on Mercer Street